The Out of Bounds effect

The Out of Bounds Effect provides a way for you to create the illusion of an object extending outside of a picture frame creating a very cool effect that will impress all of your friends. Let me show you how to create this effect in Photoshop Elements 10. I'll be giving this video with the Elements 10 Organizer already open. And I'm going to scroll down in my Media browser, and I'm going to select an image that I'd like to use for this effect. Now, the best images are ones that have good contrast and are essentially an image of a subject. So, it could be a person, it could be a landscape.

But you'll find, like certain images such as, say, this image here, would not be a good candidate for this effect because there's really nothing to make protrude outside of a frame. So, I'm going to use this image here, called IMG_4017.jpg. And with this image selected, I'm going to come up here to the Fix tab, click on the arrow to the right and choose Guided Photo Edit. When this image opens, I'm going to scroll down a little bit and there's a category called Photo Play. And as its name implies, a lot of these options are really for creating fun creative effects inside of Elements 10.

So, I'm going to choose Out of Bounds in this example. And you can see up here at the top, we have a preview of what the effect looks like when you're finished, and when you move your cursor over it, you can see what the original image looked like. This image that we have selected is going to be a good candidate for this. So, I'm going to scroll down a little bit, and the first step is to add the frame to this image. Now, what I'm going to do to make this a little bit easier, is I'm just going to Zoom in a little bit on this image, so I can grab my Zoom tool and just click to Zoom in a little bit. That looks pretty good.

To give myself a little bit more room, I'm going to double-click on this Project Bin tab to open it up so I can see this in full screen. That'll work out pretty well. So I'm going to click the Add a Frame button And that's going to add a frame to my image. Now once this frame is on here I can move this around, change the overall size. So, I'm going to make this a little bit larger here. And as you can see, I'm going to position this in a way that the top of this rock is protruding out of the top of the frame. So, I'm just going to reposition this, that looks pretty good.

I still want some foreground in here to give it a little bit of depth, so we'll make this a little bit bigger. I think that looks pretty good. Now, what I'm going to do, in addition, I want to give the picture frame a perspective. So, this frame that's been added, that's going to be the shape of the picture frame. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to hold down Shift+Option+Cmd on Mac, or Shift+Alt+Ctrl on Windows. And I'm going to drag one of these corner handles, so if I, if I'm dragging the top right corner handle, I'm just going to Click and Drag down. And you can see that it's distorting this frame in a perspective shape. So, that looks pretty good.

As we scroll down here, we can see that we're going through it step by step. So, we've moved the frame by dragging the corners. And then 1C is we're adding some perspective. So, we definitely did that. And finally, 1D, click the green check mark. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that, and that's going to apply that frame. Now, it's a matter of adjusting the frame width. Depending on your perspective, you can adjust this in a variety of different ways. But what I'm going to do is hold down Shift + Option on a Mac, or Shift+Alt on Windows, and I'm going to drag one of the corner handles, and that's going to expand this from the center. So, if you didn't get the overall expansion even, you can just drag one of the side handles here to get the overall thickness of the frame about even. And once you've done that, then we're going to click on the green check mark again to apply that, and you can see that now we have, like a border around our photo. That looks pretty good.

Now, the next step is to select the extension. So, here we have the Quick Selection tool, I'm going to click on that button. And up here at the top, again, we can adjust our brush by using the Left and Right Bracket keys on our keyboard. So, if you want to make it bigger or smaller, you can do that quite easily. And I'm going to Click and Drag just to select, you know, that shape. And that's why it's good to have an image that has decent contrast between the subject and its background.

So once I've done that, I'm going to click the Create out of Bounds button, and that's going to make that shape protrude from the picture frame. Now we can add a drop shadow to our image. So, I'm going to go with maybe a medium shadow. I'll click the Medium button, and we can see if that shadow has been added to our Frame here. And then, the last step is to add a gradient. So, if I click the Add a Gradient button, it's going to create what's called a Gradient Fill layer. And I'm just going to call this background and I'll go ahead and click OK. And now it's asking me to choose a gradient.

If we click on the arrow to the right of the Dradient drop down, we have some default options that we can choose. So, we can click on these different options to see the effect that it's creating. And you may or may not find a gradient that contains the color you're looking for. So, I'm going to pick one as a starting point. Maybe we'll start with this one. So, if you click on this Gradient icon right here, not the arrow but right in the middle, it's going to bring up the Gradient Editor. And this allows you to make adjustments to this. These are what are called GradientStops.

These define the color of the gradient. So, if I click on this Stop, I can then click on the color, and then that allows me to choose whatever color I want. So, I can even come down here, and I can pick up a color from the image. So, if I pick, say, like a bluish color, you can see it applies that color to the background. And if I pick up one of the colors within the photo, it picks up that color. So, I'm going to try to pick up one of these reddish colors, like a deeper red.

This is the actual color that's being used. I can click on that and drag it over to enhance that color. We'll click OK. And then, you can adjust these color stops, if I drag them, it's going to change the transition point of the gradient. So, you can change this and adjust it to your liking. And we're not really seeing these colors here because it's a radial gradient and most of that color is being hidden by this image. So, we will go ahead and click the OK button and then OK again.

And you'll see that now the background has been appropriately applied to this image. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to click Done. One thing we may want to do is refine this a little bit because the photo is a little off center in this case. So, what we can do to refine it is click on the Full button and that's actually going to open that up in the Full Editor and I'm going to double-click on the Project Bin to collapse that. Because if you look down here in the lower right corner, we can see all the components that make up this image. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the Top layer, so that's our inside photo, and I'm going to scroll down.

And I am then going to Shift-click, not the last one, not the background layer but the, the last layer before the background. And if I come over here and select the Move tool, I can then Click and Drag to reposition this, to center it within the image. When I'm finished, when I'm happy with that, I can just click on the outside to deselect that, and that looks pretty good to me. So, I'm going to come up here, to the File menu and choose Save, as I've been doing, I'm going to include in the Organizer and save it in the version set with the original.

Go ahead, and maybe we'll give this a more appropriate name. Instead of Edited 1, let's call this Out of Bounds. And then, we'll go ahead and click the Save button, and then we can close this image by clicking the X. And now, when we're returned to the organizer, we can see we have a, a version set with the original image that kind of got pushed down to the next row here. But we have the original image over here and then our Out of Bounds effect over here. So with the right subject, you too can create the Out of Bounds effect with your own photographs. As a matter of fact, now that you know how the feature works, you may want to keep that in mind as you're taking photos with your camera so you can compose the photo in a way that will allow you to use the Out of Bounds Effect in Photoshop Elements 10.

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Released

9/29/2011

Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 provides some powerful tools to help you do everything from managing and organizing your photos, to optimizing your images and making basic adjustments, to sharing your final results and making great prints. In this introduction to Photoshop Elements, Chad Chelius walks you through the new features introduced in Photoshop Elements 10, including tools to improve searching for photos and dealing with duplicates and new effects like Depth of Field and the Orton effect. Along the way, discover how to add special effects to your photos, tag images both by keyword and with the people recognition feature, and correct common problems like underexposure, overexposure, and color casts.